Customers are the perennial target of promotional marketing messages, campaigns, and advertisements. With more and more messages turning out to be irrelevant to them – like the promotional campaign asserting the value of studying at a specific foreign institution getting rolled out to to a retired officer – customers are only turning away from brands.
The spark of interest is ignited only when marketers deliver the right message, roll out the right campaign and ads to the right audience. This is best achieved through targeted segmentation – going beyond the broader customer segmentation and putting customer micro-segmentation marketing to work – where marketers put the best foot forward to deliver relevant and enriching customer experiences.
By dividing a customer group into smaller segments – customer micro-segmentation marketing based on different characteristics – marketers can achieve better accuracy in terms of predictive analytics and build right campaigns for the right micro-audience in using micro-segmentation for increasing ROI.
How to make the most of customer micro-segmentation marketing?
Connecting the ‘persona’ to customer micro-segmentation marketing
Marketers hit the bull’s eye when they know who their target audience and how they would respond to their campaigns. In short, it is about knowing the ‘persona’ that guides marketers in predicting the responses of the audience. The persona here is about knowing more about customers, from the place they belong to, their interest, likes, behaviors and lifestyle. The ‘personal’ twist lays the path for using micro-segmentation for increasing ROI.
Let’s take the case of marketer setting up the case for ‘men style outfits’ – or when it comes to promoting men’s trendy wear, it would mean going all over the place by targeting men in the range of 20 – 35. Rather, it is about targeting the ‘trendy men’ who are used to buying trendy apparels and have purchased style outfits in the past. Keeping a close watch on the ‘lifestyles’ can lead to better targeting and making accurate predictions. Where prospect lifestyles can pave the way for tailoring campaigns, entwining attitudes, likes and purchase intent to the lifestyles can allow the marketer to roll out personalized campaigns.
Putting customers into micro-segmentation bucket
An organization can be using micro-segmentation for increasing ROI based on several factors. Putting customers into the micro-segmentation bucket then means segmenting them based on these criteria.
- Demographical, which is about using data encompassing, age, gender, income level, gender, marital status. Educational qualifications, and socio-economic status
- Behavioral encompassing purchase intent, purchase history, pages visited etc.
- Geographical that mainly leverages location data
- Psychographic including beliefs, attitudes, personality and social status
Attributing the success of micro-segmentation to ‘attributes’
The more a segment is cut into ‘micro-segments, more effective the targeting and results would be for a brand. For this, many data points can be leveraged to enhance the granularity of segmentation. For instance, marketers can use customer data at their disposal with the social media data capturing attributes like their buying behavior, interests, likes, opinions, search behavior, buyer stage and attitude to create micro-segments in plentiful. As marketers look at every customer signal, information is readily available to look for individuals with similar attributes other than the customers in their database, create more micro-segments to reap rewards from their targeting efforts.
Better audiences for using micro-segmentation for increasing ROI
Organizations that are on the business-building mode will look for cue from their audience. And that brings us to the critical point of finding the best audiences to get the most of customer micro-segmentation marketing. For one, ‘frequent buyers’ can be good audience for targeting, wherein ad responders and coupon responders can be a good fit for using micro-segmentation for increasing ROI exercise. Going further, micro-segmentation can also consider audiences of the type belonging to discount seekers, users abandoning cart, and high-spenders.
Audience groups exhibit different characteristics – in terms of using channel for communication, preferences, activities, purchasing behavior and touchpoint preferences. Through customer micro-segmentation marketing, brands not only understand their buyers, their behaviors and their preferences but use micro-audiences to find customers who are not part of their database and who exhibit similar characteristics as that of the segmented customers.
